Watch these baby mosquitos launch their heads like harpoons to ensnare prey

When you think of nature's deadliest hunters, mosquito larvae probably don't come to mind.

But new state-of-the-art footage captures the baby bloodsuckers using sophisticated hunting techniques to ensnare and devour other insects. 

"I've used the word jaw-dropping, stunning," Bob Hancock, a biologist at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, said of the footage.

"They're kind of ambush predators, in that if another mosquito larva comes wiggling into their proximity, then it happens — and it happens fast," he told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

Hancock is the lead author of a study examining these hunting techniques, which he and his colleagues documented for the first time. Their findings were published this week in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America.

Scientists have long known that larval mosquitoes hunt other insects, usually other baby mosquitos. 

But they're so small, and it happens so quickly, that researchers have never been able to observe the phenomenon in detail — until now.

The team filmed the tiny killers in slow motion under a microscope in a process called microcinematography. 

What they saw blew their minds, Hancock said.

Two species — Toxorhynchites amboinensis and Psorophora ciliata — "launch their heads, literally, from their bodies," like a harpoon toward their prey, Hancock said.

"And as they're doing that, their mouthparts are gaping and they clamp down on the prey, and it's over quickly because they end up just shovelling it into their bodies," Hancock said.

Another species — Sabethes cyaneus — coils its long body toward its unsuspecting prey, grabs it with its tail, then promptly stuffs it into its mouth.

"We've never seen either of these ways demonstrated before in any circumstances," Hancock said.

Daniel Peach, a University of British Columbia entomologist who was not involved in the study, says most mosquitos in their larval form are detritivores, meaning they "filter-feed" off of nearby detritus, hoovering up decaying materials and microorganisms.